I feel like quitting, I want to give up cuz the multitude of these recent moments are getting to be too much. That’s life tho right, ups and downs, ebbs and flows, the yins and yangs of existence. I want to get powerless, surrender but the fear in me won’t let that happen, I’ve still got this idea that I am controlling something. When I get to this point of insanity in life it makes me think of all I’ve learned in NA and the one prayer that has helped me through the toughest of times - God help. How many times I’ve uttered those words over the last 10 or so years I could not tell you, I can tell you tho that the 10 prior I prayed for specifics. In the last 10 I’ve grown into a point of knowing so little of what I need that “God help” is all I can say. It took lots of work on being humble, on ridding myself of as much ego as possible to be able to find the trust in surrendering. Trust to what may come on the other side of those words, the surrender, is paramount. Being the watcher of my life and not always living it is just as important as the trust, to remove my emotional ties to the present to see clearly. If I’m fully self-contained, fully obsessed on me and my experiences, my feelings, my thoughts, I cannot see what is really happening in and around my life. I cannot see what the universe is giving me at any given moment, I cannot see what God is doing for me.
I mean in all honesty I’ve still no concrete evidence what or who god is, I’m still not 100% sure that my dealings in life or my experiences are not by design of self’s choices and that God has no role in the outcomes. I know not if it is all purely karma from this life or a life I lived 146 lifetimes ago. I’ve no idea if we are all just test subjects and trapped in the Matrix, and really at some point I stopped caring to know. I stopped living in the obsessive need to “know” all the answers, to have a complete understanding of life and a grip on it. This makes me think of crazy people, like the truly mentally ill ones that walk the streets and talk to the air about them. Odds are they know not they are crazy; they are just living in the reality they exist in and really how simple could that not be. It’s torturous for them at times I’m sure, but really to not question what is real, what is true. I mean maybe some due and they are trapped like so many others in this world, but to be free of fear and ego and let it all go, to believe and trust in the moment, consistently, without doubt. I need to push that button, the button that disconnects my emotional attachment to the circumstances around me and gives me eternal faith in every moment.
Quitting is just an easy way out for me, I know it would involve drinking and drugs, skipping town and destroying all I’ve worked for – this really is not what I want. I do however want to be removed from fear and let go of the attachment to my feelings towards life right now. Not meaning I don’t want to feel, I just want to have a feeling and let it go so I don’t have to carry it around with me like a suitcase full of rocks. My obsession with the suitcase is ridiculous. I carry it around 24/7, to work, to the bathroom, to the grocery store. I carry it to bed, dream of it in my sleep and obsess on it in conversations when I should be listening to you. It starts to control my life and dominate all my thoughts. Minutes to turn to hours and at times hours to days of obsessing and nothing gets accomplished in my life. It goes as far as to put breathing on the back-burner and I don’t know this till I start releasing these huge sighs. I get so obsessed on these thoughts, these moments, these fears, these thoughts of my feelings on the fear of what was, that I forget to breath - is that not insane?
I get into dream like states when I am there, seeing a future that doesn’t even exist, thinking I know how everything is going to be but in reality, I’ve no clue. Then the fear kicks in harder and it increases the imagery in my head, the lies I tell myself. I go as far to seeing myself throw my life away and live out of a cardboard box in the hopes that I will become crazy enough to live in an alternate reality where I know not this: It’s a choice to let go and be present in the moment, that is where I find all my peace and happiness. That is where fear does not exist, where the future is just a word other people say and the past is so distant that not even a memory is present.
When I get here, to these lows in my spirituality, the severing of the connection to something grater then myself, I turn to that prayer, the guy who isn’t even sure if prayer works. “God help” is all I can utter to myself, repeatedly. I say it in the hopes that I will find some peace, some solace – that I will find something to relieve me of my self-obsession. That I will surrender, relinquish control, I will become powerless and find faith and trust. And even as I write all this it is still baffling to me that I would turn to a prayer. I see people ask for prayers, I see people send prayers, as if we all pray enough that the outcome will change and if we don’t it will turn out the way you are praying against. Is there someone or something somewhere counting the prayers and deciding the fate? I haven’t understood prayer since I was a little guy in Catholic school and I was praying to repent of my sins at 6 years old.
Is it that we pray not only for the person but to be selfless? Like we are all self-obsessed on some level, even the holiest of thou, but is that why we pray, to think of someone else, to care for someone else? Is it to get out of our heads and into our hearts where all the good stuff lives? Fear, anger, resentment – none of these things live in our hearts, only love, kindness and compassion reside there. So what exactly does prayer do? People will send me prayers after an accident, somehow I am always injuring myself, my special skill I guess. Prayers for a speedy recovery they send, do I actually heal faster due to a few people praying for me? Is the prayer just a way to send positive energy out into the universe for me? So I feel thought of and cared for? And if that’s the case, to feel thought of and cared for, isn’t that feeding my character defect of insecurity or my severed connection with my spirituality? Or is prayer more for the prayer with the intention of it being more for me?
Intention, that just brought me out of the clouds. I have a friend, he’s a Buddhist, one who is for more devoted than my part time ass and I asked him about getting positive things from doing selfless acts. It has always felt weird to me, being selfless and getting that positive reverb from it. I started to question the things I had been doing, not knowing or being completely sure if I was doing them for you or for me, kinda like my prayer quandary. I like to feel good inside, to feel happy and kind, loving and compassionate and generous, it’s my sweet spot in life (if I could only find a way to survive financially by donating all my time to helping others). I asked him about the reverb, the good stuff I get back for random acts of kindness and he said it all has to do with intention. “Are you doing what you are doing for yourself or are you doing these things for the virtue of the person?” I said I was doing it for the person, and he asked why am I doing it for the person and I says “Cuz it’s the right thing to do and cuz I have so much in my life, it is wrong not to share what I have”. “Then you truly are being selfless and the good feeling afterwards are a byproduct of living right and doing right”.
So is prayer the same way as selfless acts? We pray for someone with the intention of helping them and to get the good feelings afterwards is a byproduct? And if that’s the case do the good feelings propel us to pray more for others and get us further out of self in the hopes that one day our happiness will not be the center of attention and the happiness of others will be? And if that’s the case, why do we pray for ourselves? There’s no reverb from that, there’s just that feeling of surrender and lessons in cutting away spiritual materialism. Spiritual materialism is ego by the way, also the title of a good book written by a well-known Buddhist, Chögyam Trungpa. I’m currently halfway through his 615 page book on “The Path of Individual Liberation” the majority of it is about meditation (these Buddhists take their meditation pretty serious).
So really why do I pray? I know others who do not, who have not one idea of spirituality or god or anything of the such. We all can’t be right can we? How do they make it to the end of the day when their head is trying to kill them? When they want to throw in the towel and run off into the sunset to never have to feel or deal ever again. Drugs? Alcohol? Sex? Anything that will distract them from their present state of mind? What if they don’t get down like that, they don’t use anything too change the way they feel.
This has totally spiraled into a rabbit hole of insanity. This is exactly what I am talking about. My mind goes off on these tangents and questions and wonders and picks apart everything I know, making me second guess what I know in my heart and soul. My obsessive-compulsive nature tries to kill me once again, my monkey mind gets bored and wants to play with me cuz serenity is difficult to sit with it at times, coupled with the fact that I’m obviously the most important person in the universe so let’s think about me some more. It all pushes me towards fear and then I detach from my spiritual path. It starts to create anxiety of the future and replays the past for the depression effect. Fact is tho, is that everything is always changing, every breath is a new breath and with that new breath is a new moment I can exist in if I choose to be present. Fact is whether prayer works or not, its time spent thinking about someone or something other than my self.
This all started cuz I was at a point in my head where I was feeling defeated by life, but life is not an aggressor, life is life and it’s my perception of it that makes it what it is. This started 3 days ago and I should not live in 3 days ago, I should live in the now, and now it is time to go to work. The moment has changed and so have I, I’ve let go of what was and now I am living in what is. All I ever have to do is to slow down and be present and all my worries will wash away, all the pains, all the fears.
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